Word
has come down the line that the inventor of the Doppler Effect organ
speaker, Don Leslie, died quietly in his sleep Thursday night, about 9:00 <=
br>
PM at his home in
side. Leslie was 93, and had been experiencing heart problems for a number =
of years, but was alert and active right up to the very end. He requested <=
br>
a direct cremation, so there is no wake, but there is a private memorial
Leslie's tinkering with rotating speaker baffles and horns in the 1930s led=
to the introduction of the first Leslie Vibratone
speaker, the Model 30, in
December, 1940. After an unsuccessful bid to try to promote the Vibratone
to the tone deaf and iconoclastic Laurens Hammond and his lackey engineer, =
John Hanert, Leslie set out on his own to create
probably the most
successful company in e-org history. It was in no small part due to
Leslie's various models that the home e-org market blossomed into what it <=
br>
became, despite
Hammond buyers would have to go to the retailer of other organ makes in
order to obtain "Hammond Leslies," the 21- and 22-types, for their
home
Hammonds, as Leslie sales by franchised Hammond dealers were strictly
forbidden, a policy the Hammond Company didn't officially rescind until
they had started to precipitously lose market share to competitors in the <=
br>
1960s. Almost all other organ manufacturers entered into joint sales and
exception to this was Jerry Markowitz' Allen, which had devised its own
rotating Gyrophonic Projectors, which Markowitz=
felt
were more suitable for
classical and liturgical use.
Don Leslie will most probably be remembered as a so-so engineer, but an
adventurous inventor and truly a shrewd businessman. The invention of the <=
br>
Vibratone wasn't done strictly for the garnerin=
g of
huge profit, as was the
Hammond Organ, but rather, was due to Leslie's love of the theater
organ. He knew that the Hammond was a tonal failure from its earliest
days, and, knowing enough about Dr. Doppler's theories on frequency shift <=
br>
and knowing how a pipe organ's tremulant worked,
devised the Vibratone on
his own, markedly improving the sterile, steely Hammond tone into something=
that more resembled the prototype. He continued development in the '40s,
they did. Leslie sold his Electro-Music Corporation to the ever-growing
CBS music conglomerate being formed by William Paley in the 1960s, which
Fender and other musical instrument and high fidelity concerns.
Despite common thought to the contrary, Don Leslie never thought too much <=
br>
of his original Vibratone and its successors. H=
e felt
his crowning organ
speaker achievement was the "Isomonic
System" engineered with Dick
Peterson, designer of the fabled Gulbransen Ria=
lto K, That partially solved
the problem of single channel intermodulation
distortion in electronic
organs of the era. This was a "C-C#" setup, somewhat mimic=
king
the
diachromatic positioning of organ pipes on a ch=
est,
done for somewhat the
same reason...to prevent adjacent notes from influencing each other. In
the pipe example, sequentially placed pipes will tend to "draw" e=
ach
other
off tune, while in the e-org, closely spaced
frequencies would cause
irritating IM distortion. Leslie and Peterson's system neatly fixed the
latter. Later Gulbransen/Leslie innovations inc=
luded
the "space
generator", an early electromechanical phase shifting device.
Leslie's personal friendship with Dick Peterson also resulted in Leslie's <=
br>
own home organ, hardly a
was gutted for the console shell and a completely custom analog organ
designed and built by Peterson himself. This organ also contains three
ranks of pipes, and is quite something to hear from all accounts. The only =
"rotating speaker" in the whole installation is a Rotosonic
derivation,
used in the string channel. Leslie himself knew that the state of the art <=
br>
had moved far beyond twirling horns and "suger
scoops", and this organ was
verification of that.
Leslie will also be remembered for his support of George Wright after
Wright's deal with Richard Vaughn and his HIFIRecord
label expired and the
Vaughn organ sold to Bill Brown of later pizza restaurant fame. Leslie
bankrolled the studio organ in
which was, at the time, the dream of any professional theater organist and =
contained a good many rare and excellent ranks of Wurlitzer pipework.
This
organ is what is heard on Wright's Dot releases, and provided him with a
Wright's Dot contract expired without renewal. The organ was mostly
destroyed in a notorious arson fire for which Wright has long been blamed, =
but never conclusively. What was odd was that the whole rank of brass
saxes and other pipework
simply "evaporated" in the fire, not leaving a
trace of molten pipe metal anywhere to be seen. Odd, too, that ranks of
VERY similar brass saxes and posthorns
should appear in Wright's later
"Hollywood Philharmonic" organ, on which he recorded, through use=
of
an
edit-capable multiplex system, many Banda LPs and CDs up until his own
demise in the '90s. Up until the end, Leslie would never speak ill of
George, although George's behavior, arguably, certainly deserved more than =
just some nasty talk.
Although one would of course expect that someone at 93 years of age would <=
br>
soon leave us, it's still sad to see that pioneer of an entire era pass
away. However, he left us with his incredible legacy of the transformation =
of the organ from being a piped instrument in a large building to one that =
could be plugged into a living room wall socket giving reasonably decent
Vibratone a success, it is doubtful that the
its sales superiority as long as it did, and electronic competitors
probably would not have been as appealing to potential buyers. All of us
living at them owe him even more.
dB
Bob Scarborough
September 04, 2004